What's amazing to me is that I meet folks who, by all estimations by the outside world, are extremely successful, fortunate and over-acheiving, but it seems like without exception, none of them thinks they've "made it" yet.
I guess it's one thing to be watching someone's rise to the top, and it's quite another to be on the ride itself.
This thought crossed my mind again as I was looking at this post by Guy Kawasaki as he evaluated his performance in his first year in blogging. Here are the cold, hard stats for Guy's blog in its first year:
- 2,436,117 page views for an average of approximately 6,200/day.
262 posts generated 6,961 comments and 1,937 trackbacks. That’s 25 comments/post and 7 trackbacks/post.
21,000 people receive RSS feeds via Feedburner and 1,457 receive emails via FeedBlitz.
- Total advertising revenue: approximately $3,350 = $1.39 cpm...
He goes into some more detail beyond these staggering numbers, but the shocking part is the end of the post where Guy says (my italics):
7. Ending Technorati ranking: #45. Highest ranking during the year: #35 or so. One interpretation of this self-judged lack of success is that the blogosphere prefers news and gossip to essays although my buddy Seth Godin disproves this theory.
I'm just blown away that a stellar, totally "results not typical" performance, could in any way be interpreted as a lack of success. Okay, so maybe he can't quit his day job and live off the revenue from the Google ads on his blog, but $3,350 is nothing to sneeze at!
Maybe this is why A-List bloggers say that there's no such thing as an A-List or a Z-List.
Apparently even A-List newbie bloggers need encouragement, so I'd like to send this note to Guy:
I just about fell off my chair when I read those statistics. Wowza!
Posted by: Maryam in Marrakesh | January 24, 2007 at 06:10 AM